Planners Call Route 34 Design Cutting Edge

First-in-the-nation raised intersections. First-in-the-state narrowed lanes and ​“bike boxes.” So what’s the problem?

Depends whom you ask.

City officials describe as cutting edge some traffic-calming measures planned for the $35 million overhaul of the Route 34 mini-highway-to-nowhere. Some bike and pedestrian advocates, meanwhile, blast the plan and continue to push for further improvements.

Mike Piscitelli, the city’s deputy director of economic development, responded to those recent criticisms in an interview. He and other city officials pointed out several first-of-their-kind traffic calming measures as they unveiled new details of the first phase of the so-called ​“Downtown Crossing” development plan.

The project is designed to transform the maligned Route 34 Connector into what was originally described as two ​“urban boulevards” featuring, in the first phase, a $100 million high-tech office and laboratory building for biomedical companies.

An estimated $35 million from the city, state, and federal government will be spent preparing the site, including reworking the roads and intersections in the area.

Plans for that overhaul have come under fire from the cycling and pedestrian advocates in the city and nationally. They charge the city is recreating the mistakes of the past by designing the area for cars at the expense of walkers and bikers. They say, for instance, that the pedestrian street-crossing distances are too wide, with too many lanes planned for Martin Luther King Boulevard.

In an interview in City Hall, city officials responded to those criticisms by listing what they called unprecedented bike- and pedestrian-friendly improvements that the city has managed to work into the plans, despite some resistance by state engineers.

Many of those improvements were the result of legislation passed by the Board of Aldermen on Nov. 4, 2011, urging the city to slow traffic and provide ​“the safest pedestrian experience” possible. A total of 18 proposed design elements came out of that legislation, from bike lanes and bike boxes to raised traffic crosswalks and intersections.

Mike Piscitelli, deputy director of economic development, said the city added 15 of those into the 90-percent-complete design plans, the latest to be drawn up. Piscitelli said the city will submit those plans this week for final approval to the Federal Highway Administration. Click here to see them.

East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker and Urban Design League head Anstress Farwell, who have been pushing the city to design Route 34 to be more friendly for walkers and bikers, said they’re still not content with the planned improvements. Farwell said she plans to continue lobbying the city for improvements in six areas, including turning radii and on-street parking.

The Missing Three

In a letter to Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez, Piscitelli outlines reasons why the city decided it couldn’t include the last three of the 18 requested traffic-calming elements:

• A raised ​“bump-out” at the southwest corner of the intersection of Church Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard had to be removed because it would have forced cars turning south on Church Street from MLK Boulevard in the way of northbound cars at the stop line on Church Street.

• A proposed traffic island on MLK Boulevard just east of the intersection had to be deleted for reasons outlined in this article and debated extensively in the comments section below it. However, another traffic island, just north of the intersection, has been added back in after being temporarily lost in the shuffle. ​“It’s a fast-moving project,” Piscitelli said.

• Engineers determined it would be impossible to include on-street parking the MLK Boulevard between Church and College streets. ​“The proposed on-street parking spaces were very limited in number and ultimately too close to other turning movements,” states Piscitelli’s letter to Perez.

Removing A Highway

Despite those three deletions, Piscitelli (pictured) said in the interview, the Route 34 redo still includes a number of significant traffic-calming and bike- and pedestrian-friendly elements, including the following:

The area will include bike lanes throughout, painted in green to make them stand out clearly. On MLK Boulevard east of Church, the bike lane will be raised to sidewalk level to further separate it from car traffic.

Raised and textured sidewalks will be in place at intersections along with ​“bike boxes,” green-painted areas at the front of traffic lanes at intersections, reserved for bikes. Piscitelli said bike boxes like this have never been tried before in the state, as far as he knows. They will debut first at an intersection near Gateway Community College’s new downtown campus.

Three intersections — at Church and MLK, College and MLK, and College and South Frontage — will be raised to create ​“speed tables.” They will be the first raised intersections in the country to be placed on an ​“arterial” road, Piscitelli claimed. Usually speed tables are reserved for residential neighborhoods, like East Rock’s Edwards Street, where one was installed last year.

Those intersections will not, however, be raised six inches and made even with curb height, as some people had requested. The intersection will be raised four inches. That’s enough to slow traffic down and still create a clear distinction between the sidewalk pedestrian area and the car area, according to Piscitelli. That’s important for blind pedestrians who might otherwise not realize they were walking into an intersection, said Donna Hall, a project manager with the City Plan Department. The city chose four inches rather than six inches also because of the number of emergency vehicles expected to use the intersections.

The intersection of Temple Street and MLK Boulevard will be ​“tightened up,” Piscitelli said: Made tighter and more perpendicular. Instead of a speedy merge, cars turning right onto MLK Boulevard from Temple Street will have a stop sign and a raised crosswalk to slow them down.

All intersections will feature ​“exclusive phase” crossing signals, meaning that traffic will stop in all directions whenever the crosswalk buttons are pressed. That’s just one of several features that will mean longer wait times for motorists, said Piscitelli and Hall.

Right Amount Of Congestion?

Designing the project has been an exercise in trying to determine just how much congestion-induced frustration drivers can take, Piscitelli said. The right amount of congestion can encourage people to find alternate routes or even to find alternate means of transportation. ​“Introduce too much frustration,” he said, ​“and people start blowing red lights.”

Piscitelli said he expects more fine-tuning in the plan once the work is complete and the city has a sense of how it works in practice and not just in theory. Tweaks could include adjusting the timing of traffic lights and perhaps introducing on-street parking at certain times of day or days of the week.

Asked what he would respond to cyclists and pedestrians skeptical about the new Route 34, Piscitelli said he would point to the bike boxes and bike lanes throughout. He would note that the bike lanes constitute the area’s first ​“full trunk of east-west” route. He would point out the raised and textured crosswalks throughout, and the exclusive phase crossing signals.

“No One Bikes On A Highway”

City spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton put it more succinctly: ​“We’re taking out a highway. No one bikes on a highway. No one walks on a highway.”

The intersection of Church and MLK, which has come under fire by biking and pedestrian advocates for featuring five lanes of traffic to cross, is narrower than the intersection of Church and Elm street, Benton said.

It’s narrower than Church and Chapel too, said Hall. ​“Church and Chapel is bigger than anything we’re proposing.”

Benton stressed the importance of comparing the planned improvements to what is there now — ​“a highway.”

“Remediation,” Not ​“Innovation”

East Rock Alderman Elicker said he would still like to see more. He was unmoved by explanations of why some elements had to be excluded. ​“Ultimately, there’s a technical answer for not doing just about everything,” he said. ​“If you took out a lane, you’d have room for all the things we’re looking for.”

“I think the problem is the lens that we’re looking at the project through,” Elicker said. It’s a matter of ​“vision,” he said. ​“What kind of a city do we want to be?” Are we thinking ​“two years ahead or 10, 20 years ahead?”

“We should be building infrastructure for the future,” he said. Around the country, cities are building walkable and bikeable centers to prepare for a future in which people drive less, he said.

The problem, too late to fully fix now, is that the city went about the design process backwards, argued the Urban Design League’s Farwell (pictured). Instead of first designing the roads — and particularly creating a better intersection at Orange Street, which would help divert traffic away and obviate the perceived need for five lanes on MLK — and then finding a developer to build in the new corridor, the city went about it the other way around, Farwell said.

“They’ve designed a strange hybrid” road system, Farwell said. It has some of the features of city street, but the city has ​“left in all kinds of things that are more like an arterial highway.”

As a result, the city is left to to ​“try to put in these kind of reverse-engineering elements” in order to slow cars down.

“I wouldn’t call it innovation,” she said. ​“It’s more like remediation. These are remedial techniques.”

It’s not too late to improve the plans, Farwell said. She said she’d still like to see improvements in six areas: landscaping, raising the height of the intersections to six inches, extending turning radii at intersections to require cars and trucks to slow down more when they turn, extending pedestrian crossing times, improving the bike lane on Temple Street, and bringing back the on-street parking on MLK Boulevard.

“I don’t think there’s anything more we can ask than these small things,” she said.

“We are in the 90 percent phase, not 100 percent,” Alderman Elicker said. ​“Let’s tweak these small details.”

“I don’t think anyone’s trying to take away from the good work the city’s done,” Elicker said. Speed tables are now planned for three intersections rather than two, as in earlier plans, he noted. ​“They’re great things. I commend the state and the city. … It doesn’t mean we should say, ​‘Good job. That’s enough.’”

“This whole process has been a failure in communication and dialogue between the city and the state and the community,” Elicker added.

Faced with this criticism in the past, city officials have repeatedly noted that they have held dozens of public hearings on Downtown Crossing and Route 34.

That’s true, Elicker said, but cycling advocates feel like after they showed up at all those meetings and gave feedback, the plan didn’t really change.

“There’s a lot of distrust that has been created as part of this process,” he said.